Posthuman Labor

Women working at ordnance plants in World War I: spanner slotting fuse on head end of fuse bodies at Gray & Davis Co., Cambridge, Mass. (1910s), Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC.

With the emergence of information technology and cybernetics, it became possible to see humans and machines within the same information conveyance and feedback control system. This, in turn, made it possible to both humanize machines and machinize humans, while opening up a discussion of the “posthuman.” “Posthumanization,” an evolutionary process founded upon the advancement of science and technology, evokes both anticipation and apprehension. While humans might largely welcome the utility and convenience of weak artificial intelligence, such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s AlphaGo, there is fear that superior nonhuman beings, such as strong artificial intelligence and artificial super-intelligence, will come to dominate humans. Similarly, while the transhumanization or cyborgization that removes disabilities and enhances physical and mental capabilities might be welcomed, the machinization of desire and thought and its subjection to computers that turn everything into data through algorithmic language is largely met with alarm and dread.

This apprehension of “posthumanization” is especially pronounced when it comes to the question of labor and the concept of alienation that surrounds it. The idea that humans would become simplistic tools or even completely useless after being replaced by machines seems to have struck a nerve in public discourse. But do machines actually cause alienation from labor? Or could this existential anxiety emanate from the way we view our relationship to machines and labor more widely? If machines can indeed replace human labor, does this not mean that humans would be able to engage in activities other than labor? The transition from a human society to a posthuman society demands a transformation not only in the relationship between humans and machines, but also in an understanding of labor itself.

Alienation and Technology

In the late 1950s, Gilbert Simondon pointed out the limitations of Marx’s understanding of labor and worked to resolve the problem of alienation in a different way. As opposed to the ownership of the means of production and the opposition between labor and capital, by tracing the origin of alienation to the emergence of factories and the transition from handicraft to machination in the nineteenth century, Simondon focuses on the physio-psychological discontinuity between the human laborer and the technical object being worked with.1 While the asymmetrical construct of capital and labor is certainly a precondition for distorting the relationship between humans and machines, Simondon emphasized the fact that all humans—whether a worker or a capitalist—could no longer directly engage with technical objects. In other words, craftsman were not alienated when they were able to move tools with their own body and feel the accuracy of their motions. But when technical objects stopped extending human motion and became automated, humans lost this quality of relation. As machines increasingly became not tools in and of themselves but tool-movers, a position previously thought to be occupied by humans alone, humans were left to either organize or assist the operations of machines. Does this situation, which makes humans not a direct subject of labor but assistants to or managers of working machines, inevitably produce alienation? Or can we understand this discontinuity as the emergence of a new relationship, based not on alienation, but rather post-labor?

According to Simondon, what is necessary to overcome alienation is not to fight machines, but rather to abolish the paradigm of labor. “Labor” is a concept that was appropriate in a time when technical objects such as simple tools still needed human power, and in which humans as their movers played the role of technical individuals. Yet when technical objects evolved to become automated, humans had to engage in “technical activities,” which cannot be reduced to either labor or using machines, but includes creative activities such as inventing, repairing, and adjusting.2 Transitioning from a social paradigm of “labor” to one of “technical activity” requires a fundamental change in the way we understand life: from being oriented by substance to being oriented by relations. In this sense, it is necessary to eradicate hierarchical segmentation and social prejudices that work to cut communication and relationships between workers within technical activities. In other words, technical activities presume not only a symmetrical, synergistic relationship between humans and technical objects, but also a fair and collaborative relationship amongst humans themselves. Alienation will disappear only if machines are allowed to mediate between humans who work both above and below them and if it is possible to forge new significations and emotional sympathies across conventional orders of society.3

Capital-Technology and Critical Literacy

Bernard Stiegler criticizes Simondon’s view for overlooking the power relations between technology and capital. Unlike what Simondon expected—that with the emergence of information networks human society would evolve from labor-based communities to transindividual collectives based on inventive technical activities—Stiegler claims that digital networks have produced disindividuated agents of consumption and widespread “cognitive and mental alienation.” Modes of cultural production and consumption that utilize digital networks have industrialized “mnemotechnics” to produce a uniform and homogeneous society of consumers which serve the interests of the market more than their own. Like Deleuzian “dividuals” in the control society, the public can no longer makes a “we”—a group of unique individual “I’s”—but rather becomes an unspecified “one,” devoid of singularity. In other words, humans have become something between an “ant (covered with prosthetics)” and a “spider (eating itself in the midst of a network),” and society has become merely a multi-agent system akin to that of insects. According to Stiegler, in this hyper-industrial age, pre-individual human nature has become techno-industrial, with humanity’s symbolic, mental, and motor functions becoming externalized through, and in turn controlled by, technological prostheses.4 Motivation declines, instrumentalization is accelerated, and labor is depreciated. Symbolic misery has become universal, ignorant of social class. The proletariat has lost the knowledge and ability to control machines, and in turn has become a tool of them.5 Laborers are deprived not only of “savoir-faire,” but also “savoir-vivre.”

How, then, in an age when digital information networks act in collusion with consumer capitalism, do we overcome the poverty of the human mind and comprehensive proletarianization? Stiegler’s solution is to provide “attentional care” for the human mind and foster “critical literacy” towards the emergent technological environment. He claims that deprived spirits need to be revived, intergenerational disconnections restored, and short-term impulses converted into long circuits of desire. Furthermore, Stiegler states that we need to cultivate critical thinking so that we may resist a network culture that is controlled and homogenized by capitalist interests and build a new socio-technological network, one that incorporates fundamental human values such as spirit and desire. That said, Stiegler’s solution is limited in that it still presumes the opposition between technology and humanity around labor and thus does not deviate from the Enlightenment tradition based on anthropocentric humanism. Critical transformation of the preconditions for transindividuation, which are currently overdetermined by industrialized mnemotechnical media, and the rearticulation of the relationship between the “I” and the “we,” will only be effective when resting upon a posthumanism.6

Post-Labor and Technical Activity

Simondon thought that the problem of alienation is to be resolved by establishing a “technical culture” and a collaborative coexistence between humans and machines. Stiegler, conversely, believes that the poverty of spiritual culture that has appeared in the hyper-industrial age is to be overcome by recovering “critical literacy.” Although neither Simondon nor Stiegler took aim at the question of labor and the problem of alienation in a posthuman society as such, an idea of the post-labor condition to come probably lies somewhere between Simondon’s planning and Stiegler’s prescription. In other words, Simondon’s argument that the paradigm of life should be shifted from labor to technical activities is still valid for envisioning a “post-labor” condition, but the critical interventions recommended by Stiegler into the realms of knowledge, spirit, and desire are necessary for Simondon’s vision of post-labor to be realized. Yet as both Simondon and Stiegler have claimed, it is through fostering critical literacy and the realization of “technical culture” that the fear of alienation and sociocultural prejudice can be overcome.

In order to think about technical activities within a post-labor condition, it is first necessary to get out of the frame of “labor-capital,” which understands work to increase productivity and thus constrains the potential for a relationship between humans and technical objects within the framework of ownership and utility. Technical activities are not about productivity and practicality, but rather the capacity to perceive and invent new relationships among heterogeneous things. Technical activity must therefore be separated from capital-productivity to reveal its creative nature. It is also necessary to escape the frame of “labor-leisure,” for if “labor” traditionally represents making a living or acting in public life, and “leisure” stands for free time to rest, think, study, and play, technical activity can’t be accounted for by either. Even if free time is not leisure based on consumption but a “scole” or “otium” in a true sense of contemplation, “leisure” is insufficient in imagining a post-labor condition, for it reduces technical activity to practical labor.

The posthuman no longer labors, but acts, technically. Post-labor is a condition within which humans no longer dominate nature but mutually cooperate with technical ensembles and relate to the world as a transindividual collectivity. If posthumanity were to be characterized as a superhumanity, it should actively work against the human capacity to dominate both humans and nonhumans alike. Rather, posthumanity is transindividual, based on communication and cooperation. Post-labor shall be an embodiment of such posthumanity.

×

Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity is a collaboration between the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and e-flux Architecture.

Jaehee Kim is Visiting Professor at Sungkyunkwan University. She has written on and translated the work of Gilbert Simondon, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler.

Psychotropic Air
A narcotic nimbus floats above us. As revealed in the 2012 report “Airborne Psychotropic Substances Monitored in Eight Big Italian Cities: Burdens and Behaviors,” the air over Italy is congested with chemical traces and particulates of nicotine, marijuana, and cocaine. 1 The report suggests that global drug use can now be tracked and diagnosed by atmospheric sampling and testing. Narcotic concentrations disclose patterns of illicit distribution and consumption below,...

How will the use of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the workplace and daily life? There is a pessimistic view that “AI creates social problems,” and an optimistic one that “AI solves social problems.” How we understand the impact of AI will be different depending on which perspective we take. But of course, we cannot completely separate these two views from each other, as many have mixed viewpoints, such as promoting AI while maintaining the precautionary principle.
To consider the...

With the emergence of information technology and cybernetics, it became possible to see humans and machines within the same information conveyance and feedback control system. This, in turn, made it possible to both humanize machines and machinize humans, while opening up a discussion of the “posthuman.” “Posthumanization,” an evolutionary process founded upon the advancement of science and technology, evokes both anticipation and apprehension. While humans might largely welcome the utility...

I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world … What interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.
—Lebbeus Woods
According to a theory developed by the influential psychologist James Gibson, daily life entails engaging with and enacting the “action possibilities” of the environment, which he calls “affordances.” 1 Affordances are possibilities for action offered...

In the 1950s, the famous American psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim treated an autistic boy named “Joey.” After ceasing all communication with the world, Joey began to think that he was a mechanical robot. He could only fall asleep after connecting his body to a complex set of machines, both imaginary and real, on his bed. The images he drew, of houses, isolated rooms, and moving vehicles full of machines, contributed to Bettelheim’s diagnosis. In working with Bettelheim, Joey slowly overcame...

A lot of people say that after they punch a wall they feel a lot better, but their hand is broken.
—David Wojnarowicz 1
On June 14, 2017 a fire broke out in a tower block in North Kensington, West London. It quickly spread. The residents’ organization based in the flats had frequently raised safety concerns about the building’s upkeep and maintenance, and expressed anxieties about the poor quality of renovations undertaken there. Their concerns were routinely ignored. The rapid...

1. Dialectics of Living and Dead Labor
In “Fragment on Machines,” Marx made the case that with investment in automated technology, which he called fixed capital, capitalism is able to reduce necessary labor time and increase both surplus labor and value. 1 Marx then speaks of the possibility of sublating surplus labor to free time, which he understood as “both idle time and time for higher activity.” This speculation, in which the type of labor corresponding to a capitalist mode of...

The Extinction of the Magic Circle
In Homo Ludens , Johan Huizinga writes that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” According to Huizinga, almost every human activity, whether political, economic, or cultural, was originally conceived in play. In the past, labor was accompanied by play and festivities. Scholarship grew out of puzzles in which sages dueled with their sagacity. Even wars were a sort of sport. An enormous magic circle hung over reality. But at some point in...

Death is a plastic force. Operating through communication channels and grounded in a culture of image sharing, domestic spin-off technologies in which death is embedded have engendered a new human body: one that contains within itself ceremonies for the deceased and counterpart sites for a new type of cemetery. These memorials are embedded in modifications of the body itself as auto-performative ritual. In a reflexive mode, this instrumentalization of death and its memorial-body shapes and...

The question of “superhumanity” presupposes that there might exist something other than the human in the human, a presupposition that might be as old as humanity itself. Such an idea has known many returns. It has continuously been addressed within the philosophical tradition, and indeed, it is returning again today.
In October of 1968, at a conference in New York called “Philosophy and Anthropology,” Jacques Derrida gave a keynote address entitled “The Ends of Man.” In it, he insisted...

Humanity has always been a design problem. A problem of whose future is sculpted by design. Of the shape of its user. Its actual interface.
The human is this question of arranging physical, chemical, electromagnetic, and genetic apparatus in time and space. How long a finger is needed to reach the trigger, or stroke another animal? How far must it extend in space? Elevated from humble materiality to a metaphysical program, the collective constellation of these design extensions is the...

Perhaps you have been struck by the frequency and regularity with which people find it necessary to state what one might think was the most obvious thing in the world: that they are human beings, or that they would like to live like them.
Here's an example from the front lines of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe last March: "'May God take his revenge on them—everyone who did this to us—from whatever country they come from,' said Raife al-Baltajy, a Syrian from near Aleppo, as...

Superimposed memories in the soil of postcolonial Korea
In 1936, amidst the Japanese occupation of Korea, a Japanese kaibatsu corporation called Maruboshi started to build residential areas and stables near the Daegu train station, within which there was a collective village named Maruboshi, near Chilseung-dong. 1 From colonial liberation in 1945 to the end of Korean War, Maruboshi filled with refugees fleeing to South Korea, transforming into a vibrant topos of commoners’ life....

I want to tell you a story I recently heard about a friend in New York—actually a friend of a friend, a young architect and entrepreneur named Peter Green Peter Chang. I have never met Peter Green Peter Chang myself, nor has anyone ever explained to me why his full name contains two Peters. But his story is somehow familiar, even if nothing like it has ever happened to me. Perhaps because it could happen to me or to anyone else in the near future.
In New York Peter Green Peter Chang...

Life is not what it used to be. Living things bearing genomes pared down, streamlined, or cobbled together from bits of synthesized DNA now scurry, swim, and flourish in test tubes and glass bioreactors: viruses named for computer software, bacteria encoding passages of James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from sweet wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from...

Nothing can hold out against civilization and the power of industry. The only animal species to survive will be those that industry multiplies.
— Jean-Baptiste Say 1
A female Aedes aegypti remains in suspended pregnancy until she ingests vertebrate blood. With hundreds of eggs in her ovaries, she begins a search for carbon dioxide and heat. Once detected, she lands on her host to penetrate the epidermis with her proboscis and deposit saliva, which as an anti-coagulant, ensures...

The rise of right-wing populist, anti-liberal, and authoritarian political alternatives has brought a renewed attention to architecture. In opposition to broad sections of the German architecture community and construction industry, for whom an “open-arms” culture represents a kind of ethically precious incentive, apocalyptics and integrationists are manufacturing rightist spaces based on increasingly solidified ideological patterns. The German right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek uses the...

Anthropogeny is the study of human origins, of how something that was not quite human becomes human. It considers what enables and curtails us today: tool-making and prehensile grasp, the pre-frontal cortex and abstraction, figuration and war, mastering fire and culinary chemistry, plastics and metals, the philosophical paths to agricultural urbanism and more. 1 Given that Darwinian biology and Huttonian geology are such new perspectives, we may say that Anthropogeny, in any kind of...

It was 2016, and the scales of territories, cities, buildings, animals, plants and human started to simultaneously expand and contract. Proximity and narrative became the matter. So we decide to retreat and prepare for the usual post-apocalyptic era.
Entry 2316.018, Mardin
I turned onto my side to face the dark red sun peering through the sand-covered window. It’s been a long time since I've seen another human being. The city was ruined during the war, to the point where it’s...

Pale light could be seen coming from gaps in a large, low building. A simple clarity had been disturbed. True size was hard to read. The function of this place was hard to define. The surrounding landscape held no markers or signs. Nothing stood close by in order to provide scale. The mass refused to reveal itself. Cuts in the facade were troubling and extreme. Great tears and raw holes had broken through a thin metal skin, yet the basic framework remained. A view through the cuts revealed...

Anton Vidokle: When Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (the curators of the Istanbul Design Biennial) told me the subject of the show—the question “Are We Human?”—I immediately thought of the writings of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian Bio-Cosmists, and their ideas about the unfinished state of human evolution.
Cosmism is a little known intellectual and artistic movement that arose in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century. At its base is a philosophy of immortality and...

Chapter 1
As I scan the fields below I see her, in the corner of my lens. She is playing below, in a town I have never heard of, in a place I will never visit. It is 2pm on a Tuesday.
I am on a long mission that launched back in World War I, and I am still flying. I look down on the world. I am unmanned. I am operated, I am programmed and subject to your motivations I drift across voyeurism, horror and wonder. What I choose to focus on defines who you are, and in the glass of...

1. Cognitive Automation and Engineering of the Self
“Observing his subatomic self … no chronology was stable.”
—Jonathan Franzen, Purity
“A knower, whatever name one may want to call it, self experiencer, protagonist, needs to be generated in the brain if the mind is to become conscious. When the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind, subjectivity follows.”
—Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
Contemporary technological development tends to move towards...

Creative Destruction and Cybernetic History
I saw the future. It was empty.
A clean slate, flat, designed through and through.
In his 1963 film “How to Kill People” designer George Nelson argues that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both the form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology.
An accelerated version of the design of killing recently went on trial...

My question is not “What is a human being?” but a smaller question, one that isn’t frequently asked but one that turns out to be important to understand the significance of the larger one. This question is this: do human beings always recognize other human beings as human beings? A special case of this would be: do human beings always recognize themselves as human beings? If they do, what are the means of recognition? One reason for asking the question is because of the way in which violence...

In the first three months of 2016, the number of wealthy Chinese couples hiring fertility and surrogacy gestation services at US-based clinics grew by 260%. 1 Many fertility clinics based in the United States admit that Chinese nationals already constituted 40% of their clientele. This surge was in part a rapid reaction to the end of China’s one-child reproductive policy. 2 Due to the effects of long-term exposure to environmental pollution, many surrogacies requires couples to receive...

There was a period shortly before the third end when a group of mechatronic engineers were incredibly productive. It didn’t last long, but we managed to build a new Copperland, brick by brick, from the basalt rocks formed by rapid cooling solar flares. Mechatronic Systems Science Programs created new devices for communication without cell phones that emit radiofrequencies. Our Incident Update Office transformed crime-prediction algorithms into crime-prevention algorithms and abolished all...

In 1986, during a flight over southwest Amazonia, the geographer Alceu Ranzi noticed a huge geometric earthwork cut through the middle of a vast tract of deforested land. From the ground, the structure was nearly imperceptible, as it mingled with the environment like a natural topographic feature, but from the vantage point of the aircraft, its precise architectural plan was clearly distinguishable as an engineered inscription on the surface of the earth. Ranzi recognized that the “geoglyph”...

If to err is human, to design corrective systems is all the more so. When in 1962 Ivan Sutherland designed the first drafting program that would allow us, amongst other things, to draw better circles, he was in many ways simply providing an update to Leon Battista Alberti’s circle-drawing system issued some five hundred years earlier in De Pictura . Crucially, in both, one does not have to be able to draw a circle to draw a circle . Sutherland, under Claude Shannon’s wily guidance,...

Over the past twelve months, two international initiatives have been closely watched because they appear to set the terms for a new, globally punishable, architectural criminality. The Italian-Jordanian initiative Protecting Cultural Heritage: An imperative for humanity mobilized the UN, Interpol, and UNESCO to stem the looting and smuggling of antiquities out of war-torn Syria by demonstrating that their traffic “finances terrorism” and is “linked to international crime.” 1 At the same...

It’s just been scientifically proven that ducks have abstract thinking. 1 The discovery neither alters nor surprises ducks, since they’ve known this fact, since they are ducks. The discovery just reveals that we, non-ducks, are deeply fascinated by sharing traits that are relevant to our idea of rationality with ducks. If taken really seriously, the discovery is a revolution, marking, in a very nice, duckish way, the impossibility of taking the premises of humanism and humanists seriously....

If you spot a “throbber,” you’ve probably got an issue with your hardware. These small digital animations, more commonly known as buffer icons, only appear when your internet connection or browser speed is too slow to manage the volume of incoming data. In the 1990s almost every webpage used to buffer before it loaded; the old Netscape throbber (depicting a meteor shower over a hilltop) was practically the unofficial logo of the World Wide Web for many years. These days you will only see a...

The 1990s were dominated by debates about postmodernism, one strand of which was concerned with the so called “aestheticization of the life world.” Wolfgang Welsch, for example, wrote in Grenzgänge der Ästhetik , “The facades get prettier, the shops more animated, the noses more perfect. But such aestheticization reaches deeper, it affects fundamental structures of reality as such.” 1 For aestheticization means “basically that the non-aesthetic is made aesthetic or is grasped as being...

"There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena."
—Joseph Brodsky
Life on Earth is a narrative written by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The chemical design of DNA is uniform among every form of life, but its sequence is different between species and individuals. DNA sequences are comprised of millions of differentially combined chemical letters (A, T, C & G) and yield most of the current diversity of species, as well as offering an endless blueprint for the...

Per Frederick Kiesler, design is born from a crocodile—a reptile caged inside the architect’s genealogical table alongside a solitary piece of metal. 1 Were it not for the vertical line dividing the two figures, one could picture the crocodile snapping the hard rock with its open jaws and swallowing, slowly but steadily, the large mineral specimen. Design, Kiesler implies, is born by the omnivorous appetite of animal beings seeking to assimilate the most indigestible things, including...

1
I saw the white light through the monitor of my mobile phone—a burst of white light that spread from the upper-left corner of the frame the moment the surveillance camera at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport captured the detonation of the suicide bomb—and this fleeting white light meant that some people’s lives had been cruelly taken from them without any warning.
This was neither the first nor the last time a suicide bomber would strike against innocent people in a modern public space,...

The New Old Gentry
Housing is meant to make our lives more comfortable from the outside. Besides walls that protect us from hostile circumstances, we have equipped the interior with an accumulation of tools and devices. To be spoiled by all those belongings has only been followed by even more things. Digitalization marked a shift in the minimalism of interior design; while it was first about shrinking, smoothing, and hiding those tools and devices, 3D printing and the Cloud enable us to...

“Are we human?” 1 A possible way to answer this question is to ask someone who is not human. So let me ask a “replicant.” This, you may recall, was the name given to the nonhuman figures in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2 The replicant was a robot that understood humans well. A sophisticated type of android, it fulfilled a series of literary dreams and cinematic fantasies: the desire to “replicate”...

There is something elusive about the term “design.” English dictionaries tell us the word comes from French, French dictionaries point to an Italian origin ( disegno , drawing), but modern Italian uses the English word “design.” French and German have also adopted the English term, while Spanish prefers diseño . Most cultures, it seems, project the idea of design into the sphere of international English and the cool modernity it represents.
In these languages “design” has several...

One morning, while a man busied himself opening his shop, Design and Accident entered into a conversation.
Design proclaimed: “I have created humans; humans differ from others because of me; I shape their minds and lives. Their families, friends, gods, religions, organizations, communities and nations are me; their homes, schools, factories, temples, cities and graveyards are nothing but me; there is no human universe without me; I am what they eat, wear and think; I create sense in...

I
You burn me
—Sappho, addressing passion
A song from my childhood, by Fairuz, Lebanon’s most famous singer, goes like this:
I wish
You and I were in a house
A house the furthest house
Erased behind the frontiers of darkness and wind
And snow falling, wounding the surface of all things,
Making you lose your way, so that you would never leave,
And you would remain,
Next to me you would remain,
While a thousand season of jasmine would blossom, and...

I was thinking of a book, but I didn’t like that idea.
—Marcel Duchamp 1
Posthumous books are published, why not a posthumous show?
—Philippe Parreno 2
Can an exhibition be a productive medium for thinking through , and not just a kind of pedagogical illustration of extant ideas? Certainly there have been works of literature, art, and music with such magnificent ambitions, and intellectuals who have attempted to articulate the philosophy of, say, the novel,...

As of September 2016, “Brangelina” was no more.
That most super-famous of celebrity portmanteaus—Brad + Angelina—which began in 2005, during the pre-social media age, ended eleven years later, in a feverish hysteria of cruel/funny Twitter/Facebook memes. 1 This supercouple, who had surrendered their individual identities to become a clickbait-friendly brand (worth an alleged $400 million), were breaking apart. And there was nothing any of us could do about it. Some of us...

If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus.
—Adolfo Bioy Casares 1
Addressing politics in the Anthropocene, Jodi Dean identifies three possible roles for humans: observers, victims, and survivors. 2 Her analysis of these differing human trajectories exists within a clear Darwinian perspective of the world. The division of humans into passive victims, active...

In 1936, the equation wasn’t yet common knowledge and it was still decades before you could look things up on a search engine. 1 If you forgot something or had a gap in your understanding, sometimes you still needed to “phone a friend.” The best and most efficient design for information retrieval still required you to know people who knew things. Isamu Noguchi wired his friend Buckminster Fuller, an admirer of Einstein, to ask if he knew it. 2
Fuller’s reply to Noguchi—a...

Man is alone, desperately scraping out the music of his own skeleton, without father, mother, family, love, god or society. And no living being to accompany him. And the skeleton is not of bone, but of skin, like a skin that walks.
—Antonin Artaud 1
“Black” and “white” signify their own arbitrariness, and are a deliberate way of maintaining and affirming a kind of colour-blindness. When I name myself or another as “black”, I mean “one whom others regard as “black”. I could not use...

Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was...

When Aristophanes was summoned in Plato’s symposium to speak of eros ( έρως ), he reverted to the root of human nature, the bodily reality of three sexes: male, female and the vanished malefemale ( αρσενικοθήλυκο ). 1 The latter was the strongest and fastest of all, combining both male and female attributes. Its appearance was whole and round with four hands and legs, two faces, and a back on all sides. The creature was not erect and would never stand vertical to the earth. It did not...

The first and sometimes last thing an architect designs is himself. Andrea Palladio was born Andrea Di Petro della Gondola in 1508, and only became "Palladio" in 1538. The new name—concocted out of Pallas Athene , the goddess of wisdom and the name of a character in a play by Palladio’s patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino—designated Andrea as a master of languages, of both humanism and architecture. John Swan is the forgotten son of a mason, but also the moderately known architect John Soan, as...

Self-directed Exit Education
They called me a ‘snob,’ which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality.
—Didier Eribon 1
In Returning to Reims , a 2009 autosociographic account of class flight and proletarian self-hatred, French philosopher Didier Eribon, author of a well-known biography on Michel Foucault and several books on la question gay , emphasizes the role of autodidacticism...

Field Note Excerpt I: By Invitation Only
Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), May 10, 2016.
Anticipation was in the air. Old friends, new acquaintances, and profitable collaborations. “History is being made,” said one speaker after another. History and synthetic genomes.
I did not realize until sitting at the airport on my way to Boston that this was intended to be a “closed session.” The organizers asked participants not to contact any media outlets or...

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period when the conceptual framework of the “state of nature” reshaped moral, legal and political philosophy —European forests, new technologies for extracting carbon traces from arctic ice reveal, were taken down at the fastest rate to date. 1 The great forests largely turned into cropland and fuel prior to wood’s replacement with coal as Europe’s main source of energy, and the colonial economy’s appetite for ships finished off the...

If we contemplate any natural object, especially any part of animated nature, fully and in all its bearings, we can arrive only at this conclusion: that there is design in the mechanical construction, benevolence shown in the living properties, and that good predominates: we shall perceive that the sensibilities of the body have a relation to the qualities of things external, and that delicacy of texture is a necessary consequence of this relation.
—Charles Bell 1
Scottish...

I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”. That geographical concepts such as production, uneven development, territory, scale, geopolitics and the like tended to be theorized on an assumed horizontal plane of human existence makes sense, because the vast majority of human activity does more-or-less conform to the relatively narrow vertical band on the earth’s surface that can support human life. But human infrastructures and activities...

This “space of Otherness” line of nonhomogeneity had then functioned to validate the socio-ontological line now drawn between rational, political Man (Prospero, the settler of European descent) and its irrational Human Others (the categories of Caliban [i.e. subordinated Indians and the enslaved Negroes])…
—Sylvia Wynter 1
In 2014 the San Francisco-based Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) requested the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to...

Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” 1
Humanitarianism is often posed as a “practice of humanity”: an ensemble of forms of care that protect a notionally universal “human.” But who or what is the humanitarian human? Might the humanitarian protection of humanity also involve a production...

The idea of self-design is a paradox. Or, to put it more accurately, the idea of self-design will be a paradox if the self involved is understood as either too unified or too heterogeneous. If you want the concept to work, you need to articulate the self into an agent capable of taking on the verb “to design,” a target for her labor, and a relatively coherent object that emerges at the end. Even so, paradox lingers. The self that emerges should merge back into the very agent who is doing the...

It is probably a mistake to elevate those attributes of the homo sapiens nervous system that long for the right answer, the unified field, the elementary particle, or the universal truth. These beliefs are present not only in formalized philosophies, religions and political regimes of the human, but at the heart of the human’s daily activities. Some cerebral constructs—the most immaterial and ephemeral of all the body’s inventions—ossify into cast-iron closed loops of logical thinking that...

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Our new publication, entitled Superhumanity, aims to probe the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the...

e-flux conversations is a discussion platform for e-flux readers. Click to start a discussion of the article above.

Start the Conversation

Notes - Posthuman Labor

1

“The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines.” Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 133.

Go to Text

2

“The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction.” Ibid., 255.

Go to Text

3

“The transindividual passes into the individual as from individual to individual: individual personalities congregate together by recovering and not by accumulation or specialist organization as in the biological grouping of solidarity and division of labor. In the instance of the division of labor, individuals are closed up into their biological unities, as a result of practical functions. The transindividual does not localize individuals: it makes them coincide; it is necessary to communicate individuals by significations: these are the relations of information, which are primordial, not the relations of solidarity, of functional differentiation.” Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005), 302. If the “interindividual” remained on the level of solidarity among individuals separated in social coding and labor, the “transindividual” existed on the level of communication of significations based on the pre-individual potential. The inventor-technologist and the invented technical objects could serve as a driving force behind social change because they constructed new transindividual collectivity that went “through and beyond” individuals by way of the pre-individual potentiality that was inherent in individuals and came to communicate directly.

Go to Text

4

“Because of the development of its body and brain, through the exteriorisation of tools and of the memory, the human species seemed to have escaped the fate of the polyparium or the ant. But freedom of the individual may only be a stage; the domestication of time and space may entail the total subjugation of every particle of the supra-individual organism.” Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 77.

Go to Text

5

“The proletarian, we read in Gilbert Simondon, is a disindividuated worker, a laborer whose knowledge has passed into the machine in such a way that it is no longer the worker who is individuated through bearing tools and putting them into practice. Rather, the laborer serves the machine-tool, and it is the latter that has become the technical individual.” Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2010), 37.

Go to Text

6

According to Stiegler, who has inherited Simondon’s concept of individuation, the individuation of humans is characterized by the simultaneous formation of psychological individuation, collective individuation, and technical individuation. The psychological individual called “I” cannot be thought of without belonging to “we,” who are collective individuals. This is because “I” is constructed through the process of “adopting” groups’ historical heritage, or of embracing the past of those other than “I’s” direct ancestors as “I’s” own. “I” is not a stable state but is a metastable process, a process of psychological individuation, and “we” likewise is a process of collective individuation. The individuation of “I” is entered in collective individuation processes, and the individuation of “we” is generated from the process through which the individuation processes of “I’s” are mutually adjusted. Simondon has defined the simultaneous generation of these “I’s” and “we” as psychological-collective individuation or transindividual individuation. Stiegler has added here, with a stress, the individuation of technical systems not specified by Simondon. Technical systems are technical environments that connect “I” and “we,” or environments consisting of mnemotechnics that condition the individuation of “I” and “we.” Stiegler has called the psychic-collective-technical individuation formed through the simultaneous entanglement of these three strands “transindividuation.”

Go to Text

“The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines.” Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 133.

“The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction.” Ibid., 255.

“The transindividual passes into the individual as from individual to individual: individual personalities congregate together by recovering and not by accumulation or specialist organization as in the biological grouping of solidarity and division of labor. In the instance of the division of labor, individuals are closed up into their biological unities, as a result of practical functions. The transindividual does not localize individuals: it makes them coincide; it is necessary to communicate individuals by significations: these are the relations of information, which are primordial, not the relations of solidarity, of functional differentiation.” Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005), 302. If the “interindividual” remained on the level of solidarity among individuals separated in social coding and labor, the “transindividual” existed on the level of communication of significations based on the pre-individual potential. The inventor-technologist and the invented technical objects could serve as a driving force behind social change because they constructed new transindividual collectivity that went “through and beyond” individuals by way of the pre-individual potentiality that was inherent in individuals and came to communicate directly.

“Because of the development of its body and brain, through the exteriorisation of tools and of the memory, the human species seemed to have escaped the fate of the polyparium or the ant. But freedom of the individual may only be a stage; the domestication of time and space may entail the total subjugation of every particle of the supra-individual organism.” Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 77.

“The proletarian, we read in Gilbert Simondon, is a disindividuated worker, a laborer whose knowledge has passed into the machine in such a way that it is no longer the worker who is individuated through bearing tools and putting them into practice. Rather, the laborer serves the machine-tool, and it is the latter that has become the technical individual.” Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2010), 37.

According to Stiegler, who has inherited Simondon’s concept of individuation, the individuation of humans is characterized by the simultaneous formation of psychological individuation, collective individuation, and technical individuation. The psychological individual called “I” cannot be thought of without belonging to “we,” who are collective individuals. This is because “I” is constructed through the process of “adopting” groups’ historical heritage, or of embracing the past of those other than “I’s” direct ancestors as “I’s” own. “I” is not a stable state but is a metastable process, a process of psychological individuation, and “we” likewise is a process of collective individuation. The individuation of “I” is entered in collective individuation processes, and the individuation of “we” is generated from the process through which the individuation processes of “I’s” are mutually adjusted. Simondon has defined the simultaneous generation of these “I’s” and “we” as psychological-collective individuation or transindividual individuation. Stiegler has added here, with a stress, the individuation of technical systems not specified by Simondon. Technical systems are technical environments that connect “I” and “we,” or environments consisting of mnemotechnics that condition the individuation of “I” and “we.” Stiegler has called the psychic-collective-technical individuation formed through the simultaneous entanglement of these three strands “transindividuation.”

I have read e-flux’s privacy policy and agree that e-flux may send me announcements to the email address entered above and that my data will be processed for this purpose in accordance with e-flux’s privacy policy*

Next

e-flux

e-flux Architecture

art-agenda

Exhibitions at commercial galleries

Art & Education

Exhibitions, symposia and teaching positions at art schools world wide

Thank You!

Subscription pending. Your email subscription is almost complete. An email has been sent to the email address you entered. In this email is a confirmation link. Please click on this link to confirm your subscription.

Close

* This consent can be revoked at any time with effect for the future. For more information, please see our privacy policyIf you have any questions regarding data protection, please contact dataprivacy [​at​] e-flux.com